Jon Grimwood - Felaheen

"Collectable," said Atal.

Sally looked at him.

"Late Victorian," he said. And Sally realized there was a lot she didn't know about his background, but then everything he knew about hers was a lie, which probably made them even.

"Got it," Atal said suddenly, lifting free a Southgate hard drive.

"Good. Now do the laptop . . ."

"Did most of it already," he said, "while you were mooning about."

Sally sighed.

After he'd replaced the PC's casing so that everything looked normal from the outside, Atal flipped up the screen on the laptop and sat back, feeling blindly in his pockets for a disc. The antistatic wire still hung from his wrist but its crocodile clip no longer clasped anything. Atal didn't need it for what came next.

Extracting a CD from his pocket, he slipped the disc into the slot.

"Got a knife?" Sally demanded suddenly.

Atal had and he watched as Sally slid the blade between the doors of the sideboard, cracking it open. Twenty-five-year-old McClellan, VSOP Hine, two kinds of Bombay Sapphire, Armagnac XS, a bottle of Pussers Rum so dark it could have been treacle . . . The man had something for everyone, complete with matching sets of glasses.

"Okay," asked Sally, holding up a frosted tumbler. "What's this?"

"Bohemian," Atal barely raised his head from the laptop. "Art deco, possibly Lalique. Smashing it would be a crime."

Atal's virus was a kiddie script, captured from a zombie and modified slightly, then signed with someone else's tag. Attached to it was what mattered, a hack he'd written from scratch.

As hacks went it wasn't bad.

A quick skim of the network showed a six-car rats' tail exiting through a router, most of those cerberus functions had been disabled, with the machines instructed to look to an IcePort X2, which doubled as a mail server and did a reasonably neat job with network address translation, meaning everyone was effectively invisible from outside.

More or less what Atal had expected. Solid but not flashy, functional rather than bleeding edge and a good eighteen months out of date. As for the network itself, well, that still used cable.

"Okay?" he asked Sally.

She nodded.

"Right we are then." Atal switched off the laptop, counted to thirty and switched it on again. Extracting his disc, he slipped it back into his pocket.

"It's done," he said and Sally smiled.

Come midnight when the system prepared itself to back up, a sliver of script would lock out anyone still connected, which would be nobody, and fuck over the central server. First thing tomorrow, when the network came up all the keyboards would freeze and every local disc would reformat itself, several times.

Of course, it was possible to stop this by switching off individual machines at the wall, but experience proved that few people ever did that until it was too late. And the joy of the whole hack was, what with the trashed server, failed network and general panic, it might be as much as twenty-four hours before anyone thought to check inside Charlie Savoy's stand-alone to discover exactly why its hard disk kept failing to boot.

"Shit," Sally said.

Atal turned at the heartfelt expletive and found her staring down at the splintered front of a small drawer.

"Georgian card table," said Atal. "Extremely valuable . . . Well, it was."

Only Sally wasn't listening. She was gazing at a transparent plastic folder and Atal had to agree, for that amount of damage it wasn't much of a haul.

"The drawer can be mended," he said soothingly. "So only an expert will be able to tell."

"Really?" said Sally but her attention was on the folder. It showed handwritten specifications for a genetics lab recently built in North Africa by Bayer-Rochelle in conjunction with the Emir of Tunis. A joint project was mentioned, provisionally named Eight Score & Ten.

"You okay?"

"Sure." Sally nodded. "How about you?"

"Me?" said Atal. "I'm good." They'd been lovers briefly at the kampong, for the week or two it took them to admit they both preferred Wu Yung. After that, their time sharing a bed was limited to those rare occasions their host summoned them both.

From his other pocket Atal produced wet wipes and started to clean down the stand-alone's grey case and keyboard, then did the same for the laptop, finishing the laptop's TFT screen for good measure.

Just to muddle forensics still further (given he'd messed over both machines wearing gloves and the wipedown was a put-on), Atal upended a small plastic envelope of the kind banks use for loose change and dribbled the desk with crud vacuumed from a bus stop in Tribeca.

It was fair to say, Atal felt, that the obvious advantages of spoof-bombing every crime scene with a random collection of dead skin, broken hairs and artificial fibre had given a whole new lease of life to those little handheld vacuum cleaners that RadioShack sold for extracting dust from computer vents. "You done?" he asked Sally.

She smiled.

"So you see," said Eugenie, "it went like this . . ."

Before Arabic was reintroduced as the court language of Tunis all laws were issued in Turkish, legacy code from the city having been ruled by an Ottoman beylerley, which translated as some kind of pasha.

The return to Arabic took place around two centuries ago, at least, it did according to Eugenie. She kept her grip on Raf's wrist while she talked.

Already prosperous, Tunis had grown fat on the rewards of slaving, piracy and trade. And when the moriscos were finally expelled from al Andalus in 1609, many settled in Tunis, adding their skills in cookery, ceramics and metalwork to the city's existing richness. It was a city of pragmatic compromise, where Jewish merchants flourished alongside those princely pirates the corsairs, who built ornate dars to house their families and influenced Ifriqiya's foreign policy. Renegade Europeans mostly, converts to Islam from Spain and Italy, sometimes excused the requirement to undergo circumcision.

As for the wives of Ifriqiya's rulers, these were either Turkish or captured Christian, rarely indigenous. And the solid foundation of the state, those who worked the fields, led caravans or bartered in the markets were often Berber, a people given to mixing magic and mysticism with their Islam.

Quite why Eugenie felt it necessary to tell him all this Raf wasn't sure; until she got to the bit about captured foreigners giving birth to ruling beys. And then the grip on his wrist was as sharp as the steel in her grey eyes.

"Think about it," she said.

Bizarrely, Eugenie stood to say her good-byes, first shaking Raf by the hand and then dipping forward to kiss him on the cheek.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what?"

Eugenie paused, briefly considering her answer. "I could say," she said, "that I'm sorry I couldn't convince you. That I failed to persuade you to help the Emir. But it's more than that . . ."

"If you can fake sincerity," said the fox and got shushed into silence. If Eugenie was counterfeiting, then she was a better actor than he. Raf could almost feel her regret punctuate each word.

"I'm not faking anything," Eugenie said flatly. "You're not doing yourself any good behaving like this and you're not helping Zara or Hani. I've read your file," she said. "I know when someone's got issues. "

"I . . . don't . . . have . . . issues . . ." Raf said.